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Upon its release in 2014, Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s neo-noir novel Inherent Vice was met with what might be best described as muted appreciation from the director’s fanbase—with an unruly runtime that stretches past long works like The Master and Phantom Thread and comes within contact-high reach of such epics as Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood, Inherent Vice, for all its temporal breadth, seemed to say very little with its sybaritic unfurling of Pynchon’s fractal-plotted, shaggy-dog detective story, and when it did say something at all it tended to be in a wistfully depressed mumble rather than amusing stoner giggle, leaving audiences confounded as to what they just watched, and why.

At the exact moment of the film’s halfway point, she reappears in memory—Doc receives a postcard from Shasta at sea, with her sorrowful message of remembrance, of a day with a Ouija Board. “I miss those days. And I miss you. Nothing was supposed to happen this way, Doc. I’m so sorry.” Doc’s memory of that day with the board is perhaps the film’s—and Paul Thomas Anderson’s—most heartrending moment, its central moment, soaked in the sweet melancholy of Neil Young’s “Journey Through the Past” as a younger Doc and Shasta run through rain, searching for a weed connection teased by the Ouija Board. They never found the connection that day, but “that board sure did its work,” drawing he and Shasta close for one perfect afternoon, one perfect memory, kissing and laughing in the rain. The pain of this memory forces Doc to return to that spot where the board sent them, only to find the gilded, spiraling tower of the Golden Fang’s new dental headquarters. Was the postcard a secret message from Shasta, coded in lovetalk, to help him locate and bring down the Fang? Was it simply a note of lovesick regret, and his flash to return to the scene simply a moment of coincidental luck? Is the appearance of the Fang’s headquarters here, where they kissed, some brutal metaphor for time sweeping away their love? Or, like Sortilège, was the postcard quite possibly a hallucination sent forth from some blood-kinked, cell-deprived fold of Doc’s overtaxed cerebellum? What’s real, and what is simple hope? What is a real memory, and what is the fictional story we tell ourselves to survive it?

"We really stole his look from Neil Young circa 1970, with the mutton chops. Some of the wardrobes on Doc are a straight rip of him. I don’t think you can make a movie about this period and this culture without looking directly at him."

"We really stole his look from Neil Young circa 1970, with the mutton chops. Some of the wardrobes on Doc are a straight rip of him. I don’t think you can make a movie about this period and this culture without looking directly at him." -Paul Thomas Anderson

"Doc’s memory of that day is perhaps the film’s—and Paul Thomas Anderson’s—most heartrending moment, its central moment, soaked in the sweet melancholy of Neil Young’s “Journey Through the Past” as a younger Doc & Shasta run through the rain..." https://t.co/qRFcSI8iDl